[0] As someone who loves smaller hatchbacks, this really grinds my gears.
It's possible, though, that the larger vehicles represent a greater danger due to poorer visibility. I don't have enough experience driving a contemporary truck or SUV to know the driver's experience, but I do know that, when parked along the street, they present a serious visibility problem for pedestrians compared to coupes and sedans.
since the 1970s, the number of cars per person in the USA has increased by ~50%, the number of people has increased by ~60%, and, vehicle miles traveled per capita had (previous to 2020) nearly doubled.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-962-january-30-201...
Yes and no and but...
Yes - Broadly speaking most new cars are more powerful than they were in the late 70s and early 80s
No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines.
But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.
You hit on some of the complexity here. Cars are actually much quicker now. In the 1950s, a V8 police car made 85-150 horsepower. So, the bigger engines prior to the 70s were quite slow compared to cars today. As you note, the speed gains must be partially offset (fully?) by the advances in safety: tires, anti-lock brakes, pedestrian-friendly bumpers, and more.
Well, I'm not defending that position so much as I am parroting that crowd's idea that unsupervised childhoods were better.
I think in both cases there's an element of prescribing the loss of options in favor of some notion of greater good. Whether it is a warranted trade-off or not, I don't know, but the Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.
the one exception was my teacher for a public policy elective. he considered any reasonable newspaper to be an acceptable source, and accepted a simple footnote with a link as a citation. the catch was that he would actually follow the links and dock points if we had misinterpreted the source or failed to address the source's bias. I recall that students actually wrote some good papers in that class...
Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.
I don't think so. The analogy that comes to mind is the idea of letting kids play outside. People try to justify today's overprotective culture by bringing up things like cars (they existed back in the 70s too) or candy-wielding abductors (really?) or whatever, but the overall theme is this pervasive idea that we can't handle scary things (be it the outdoors or media megacorps) and therefore we should be artificially shielded from them.
Instead, wouldn't it be better to teach critical thinking in school such that when you're faced with the realities of the world, you have at least some preparation? The idea of imparting civic responsibility principles from a young age seems to work well for example with classroom cleaning duties in Japan.